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C'mon, Make Me Laugh

Published: June 7, 2002

(Page 2 of 3)

On a weeknight in early May, Ms. Essman was the featured act at Stand-Up N.Y., the venerable comedy club on the Upper West Side. Such is her standing in the business -- she has been working at the clubs since 1984 -- that she could pick up the phone that week and get herself a booking. Petite, dark-haired and about 40, she took the tiny stage in the narrow room and fixed her gaze on a middle-aged man holding a drink.

''You look so familiar to me,'' she said. ''Did I . . . ?''

Though the question cannot be reproduced here in its entirety, suffice it to say that it was a blue one. Astonished laughter shook the room. Ms. Essman had posed the question so casually and with such confidence that it disarmed the audience. No one, not even the man who was her target, seemed to take offense.

''I find a way to be acceptably mean, to be graciously mean,'' she said the next day, sipping water in a coffee bar a few blocks from the club. ''I get away with so much that men can't get away with. The reason I'm so rarely heckled is that women are not generally hecklers -- it's generally men -- and I will make them feel extremely inadequate, and they don't want to be humiliated by a woman.''

Ms. Essman, who grew up in Westchester County, has gone far with her mouth; in search of an actress to play the intimidating wife of a Hollywood agent in his HBO comedy series ''Curb Your Enthusiasm,'' Larry David chose her. Her character, Susie Greene, is Cruella De Vil in Capri pants.

Onstage, she has learned to be herself. Much of her club act is a conversation with the audience. ''I love the intimacy of it, the danger of it,'' she said. In the early years, she did characters ''because I was too afraid to speak in my own voice.'' The pleasure for her now is going freely where the mood takes her, having some rehearsed material to rely on in a pinch, but approaching a set spontaneously, as if she were the center of attention at a party.

''I can't tell you exactly what I do,'' she said. ''I put myself in a certain place, and 9 times out of 10 I go into the zone. I'm not self-conscious on a stage. I don't censor. I'm just being.''

To Provoke, Too

Mr. Maron is not unself-conscious. He's hyper-conscious. The headliner of a recent late-night bill at Caroline's, he arrived onstage with a musical flourish at 11, when the crowd in the comfortable comedy room in the theater district had thinned to a precious 30 or so. It was so quiet you could hear a swizzle stick drop.

This comedian's hangdog visage seemed to say: Look at the lousy cards I've been dealt. ''That music really amplifies the lack of people,'' he said, by way of introduction. ''If I ever do another HBO special, I would like it to be just as many people, and I'd like it to be called 'Marc Maron: Not Sold Out.' ''

The ensuing hour was an excursion into Mr. Maron's agitated soul, a ride that returned again and again to the issue of why the audience was so sparse, and what that said about him and the audience. The deeper he went, the needier he seemed, the funnier he became. It reflected an in-the-moment approach to stand-up, an antidote to all the more desperate-seeming comics with the memorized banter.

Mr. Maron, 38, grew up in Albuquerque and began doing stand-up while attending Boston University. After graduation, he went the club route, landing in New York after a short, unproductive stay in Los Angeles, where he worked as a doorman at the Comedy Store. He received favorable notices a couple of years ago for an Off Broadway solo show, ''Jerusalem Syndrome,'' about his visit to Israel. Still, it irks him that despite some television work -- he was recently host of a game show on VH1, ''Never Mind the Buzzcocks,'' and has appeared many times on Conan O'Brien's late-night program -- he is not anything close to a household name.

''I'm bad at marketing myself,'' he said over a plate of soft-shell crabs in a Times Square restaurant. ''But I do have adoring fans. I just know most of them.''

Still, the urge to commit comedy, to walk a line with an audience, to provoke as well as amuse, sends him back to the mike for more. ''It's better than it's ever been,'' he said. ''I like it when something's unleashed in the room and there's a giddiness of recognition and excitement. I like seeing a joke work, but I like it even more when there's more on the line.''

As Raw as Possible

Mr. O'Neal shares that view. He settled into a chair on the stage at Caroline's one night and quickly delved into the touchy subject of racism -- a black man talking to a predominantly white audience. ''We hold onto racism like it's a sick pet,'' he began. It was a tough sell: while some in the audience laughed hard, others had difficulty with his flippant approach. He had more luck shifting to the topic of cultural conflicts between Americans and the English. (''They stand for what we stand for, but they don't like us. I thought we kept them from speaking German.'')

Eventually the laughs started to come more easily to Mr. O'Neal, a big, heavyset man who is able to kid about his girth without turning himself into a joke.